I’ve had a lot of first days over the years. I’ve had productive and positive ones, stressful and disorganized ones, even flat out boring ones. In fact, I finally had my best first day this Monday. Most of the time, the tone of your first day is set by those in charge of onboarding you (which could be anyone from the Head of HR to an intern), so you don’t always get to choose the type of first day you have. Fortunately for you, I happen to know of a few things you can do for yourself that will put you in the right mindset as you jump into your new job.

As I've been updating my resume the last couple of weeks, I've been thinking a lot about where I am vs where I thought I'd be by now. Outside of my internships and my final semester, I wasn't very productive in college and I feel like I’m paying for that now. I did what I had to do to get by and pretty much kept to myself outside of that. Knowing what I know now, if I could go back and do college over again, here are some of the things I'd do differently.

I’ve been an intern for quite a while now; paid, unpaid, class credit, I’ve done it all. I’ve enjoyed bouncing around to different companies each semester and picking up some basics of a few different industries. As I work through my last semester of college and my final stint as an intern, I’ve realized that I’ve learned quite a few things on the way and thought I would share.